Page 43 - Rights beautiful : collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

of the Industrial Revolution were able to separate, collect, utilize,
and exploit inanimate materials. Just as previous generations
manipulated plastics and metals into the machines and products
of the Industrial age, we are now manipulating and indeed transferring
living materials into the new commodities of the global age of
biotechnology.
... ... ....
The raw material for this new enterprise is genetic resources. Just
as the powers of the Industrial age colonized the world in search
of minerals and fossil fuels, the biocolonizers are now in search of
new biological materials that can be transformed into profitable
products through genetic engineering. 12
In the recent past, bio-technological development has been well
known and taken for granted in the areas of disease-causing bacteria for
the benefit of mankind. Life forms, i.e., products of nature themselves, are
presumed under the traditional legal doctrine to be non-patentable. All this,
however, has been radically changed by the US Supreme Court’s decision
in 1980 to the contrary that life is indeed patentable. The brand new policy
is thereby unilaterally created, opening the way for the US transnational
corporations, with all the capital, technology and market well under control,
to acquire the patenting of indigenous plants and animals, and hence
knowledge. Since then, a good number of patents have been issued on cases
like the neem tree and Basmati rice of India, Jasmine rice and medicinal
plants of Thailand, and still many others to follow. All these incidents are
already well known and so blatantly arbitrary. On top of that, there is also
now the planned global patent regime under negotiation in the World
Trade Organization, known as Trade Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS),

12
Andrew Kimbrell, “Biocolonization: The Patenting of Life and the Global Market in Body
Parts”, in Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, ed., The Case against the Global Economy
and for a Return toward the Local, San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1996, pp.131-132.

OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND 37